Is Riyad Mahrez going to follow in George Orwell’s steps?
Photograph: BPI/Rex Shutterstock

Barcelona scouts have been hovering around the King Power Stadium like hypnotised flies this season, what with all that soft-shoed shuffling, zippy passing and mesmeric attacking going on. And after finally snapping out of their hazy daze they’ve come to the conclusion that they think they were impressed with what they saw. Particularly from Riyad Mahrez, a player who has finally worked out how to open his box of tricks and seemingly can’t stop practising them.

The upshot is that Barcelona are now very much ‘interested’ in taking the Algerian to the Camp Nou, where, presumably, a tiki-taka shaman will put him through his paces before he is told to take the flickometer test and study Lionel Messi at night school before being given a spot on the bench. Mahrez has been photographed in a Barça top recently too, one of only around 30 million in the world, so expect this move to definitely happen.

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One Premier League prospect who won’t be doing a George Orwell and heading to Catalonia to fight for the cause, is John Stones. The same scouts don’t seem bothered by the Everton centre-back’s curious tendency to try to impersonate Messi in his own box at least three or four times each game. No, that’s not an issue, probably because Barcelona rarely have to defend. What does bother them is his attitude, which seems a bit odd really, given that they can’t have gotten to know him all that well unless they planted a pretend friend on Merseyside. Ah. As a result they say they fear he wouldn’t adapt to the Spanish game so they’ll be looking elsewhere for a centre-back. As much as the Mill would love to say Robert Huth has caught the eye of those Barça scouts, well, some things are even too much of a stretch for this purveyor of fanciful fluff.

Manchester United and Liverpool are doing battle all over the place at the moment. Not content with duking it out for a spot in the Europa League quarter-finals and that treasured sixth-place spot in the Premier League, they’re also going to get busy bashing each other up in a battle royale for the signature of Bayern Munich’s Mario Götze, a player who in the last year has made Daniel Sturridge look like a picture of perfect health. When the attacking midfielder has finally been put back together by club doctors, Ed Woodward and Ian Ayre will flex their muscles in the direction of Munich and hope that no one remembers their desperate attempts at luring the player to the north-west when he signs a new deal to remain in Bavaria this summer.

West Ham will use Dimitri Payet’s ability to speak successfully in his native tongue to sweet-talk Belgium’s Michy Batshuayi to the Olympic Stadium in the summer. They’ll have to hope Payet’s as successful at bending ears as he is at bending free-kicks, mind, as Spurs and Juventus also fancy singing sweetly to the 22-year-old when the weather takes an upturn in June. If he isn’t, then they’ll turn their attention to Wilfried Bony, who will last about 37 seconds under Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, or Christian Benteke, because the Hammers always have such luck when trying to nurse emotionally and physically shattered former £30m-plus Liverpool strikers back to their barnstorming best.

Slaven Bilic also has an eye on Jack Grealish, who West Ham hope to rescue from the Villa Park wreckage by offering him a similar coloured shirt and the promise of a game every now and then at a club that isn’t run like an out-of-town nightclub.

On the subject of shambling clubs, Newcastle are interested in the Lyon defender Samuel Umtiti – probably a good deal more interested in him than he is in them.

Spurs will try to bring Saido Berahino to the club from West Brom at the 99th time of trying but if they fail they’ll just sign someone else with a similar surname. The Sassuolo forward Domenico Berardi will do. He’ll be cheaper and probably won’t be so free and easy on Twitter when the chips are down.

And finally, Jürgen Klopp will stop pretending he thinks Simon Mignolet is a decent keeper and try to steal away the Köln goalkeeper Timo Horn to Liverpool, a No1 with a name that already provides a honk, so hopefully his goalkeeping won’t.